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External Validity, Why Art Thou Externally Valid? Recent
Studies of Attraction Provide Three Theoretical Answers
Paul W. Eastwick*, Lucy L. Hunt and Lisa A. Neff
University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
Some studies have better external validity than others, but why? Recent studies in the domain of
interpersonal attraction have been tackling this question by documenting how people respond
differently to hypothetical versus live interactions. In live interactions, people tend to report their
experienced emotions, they evaluate others using a low-level concrete construal, and they attempt
to implement the goal of having a pleasant interaction. In hypothetical scenarios, people forecast their
emotions, they evaluate others using a high-level abstract construal, and they deliberate about others’
positive and negative features. By situating the hypothetical versus live interaction distinction within
the framework of strong preexisting theories (i.e., affective forecasting, construal-level theory, mindset
theory), this research reinforces the idea that there is nothing inherently invalid about laboratory
studies that are cosmetically dissimilar from real life. Nevertheless, it remains highly problematic to
generalize ﬁndings to a setting that elicits a countervailing set of psychological processes.
Every so often, the ﬁeld of psychology stands on a moonlit balcony and reﬂects on whether
our research reveals something important about how people experience real life. Frequently,
this soul-searching centers on the concept of external validity, which refers to the extent to
which the results of an experiment generalize to samples and settings beyond those examined
in the original study (Campbell, 1957). Over the decades, scholars have debated the severity
of the ﬁeld’s external validity troubles, with some suggesting the lack of external validity to
be a serious shortcoming of our work (Baumeister, Vohs, & Funder, 2007; Carlson, 1984;
Cialdini, 2009; Mitchell, 2012) and others more sanguine about the real-world importance
of the phenomena that psychologists examine (Anderson, Lindsay, & Bushman, 1999;
Kenrick, 1986; Mook, 1983).
Currently, the consensus view about external validity seems to be as follows. Firstly, the
observations of Mook (1983) remain relevant and highly inﬂuential: The critical external validity question is whether the psychological process of interest generalizes from the laboratory
to the real world (i.e., psychological realism; Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 1994; Brewer, 2000).
Therefore, scholars will often have good reason to perform experiments that are cosmetically
dissimilar from real life settings, especially if the experiment tests a critical element of a psychological theory or process. Secondly, a clever meta-analytical approach pioneered by
Anderson et. al. (1999) has documented a substantial association between the laboratory effect size and the ﬁeld effect size of the same psychological process across a wide array of social
psychological topics (Anderson et al., 1999, r = .73; Mitchell, 2012, r = .53). In other words,
laboratory experiments tend to produce effects that have a similar (relative) size to the effects
that are documented in ﬁeld settings. Indeed, the traditional tradeoff between the experimental control of the laboratory and the realism of the ﬁeld is far from absolute, as many
studies have successfully blended the two approaches (Reis & Gosling, 2010). Thirdly, room
for improvement remains. Despite these substantial correlations across all topics, laboratory
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and ﬁeld effect sizes do align weakly in certain domains (Mitchell, 2012); for example, sex
differences in the use of an interpersonally oriented leadership style are much larger in laboratory settings (i.e., women are more interpersonally oriented than men) than in the actual
workplace (Eagly & Johnson, 1990). Furthermore, many have argued that social psychological
scholarship will achieve greater inﬂuence if researchers conduct studies that have a clear and
immediate impact on people’s lives (Cialdini, 2009) and assess actual behavior in lieu of
self-report responses to hypothetical scenarios (Baumeister et al., 2007).
Assuming that scholars wish to take up these challenges, what is the best way to conduct
studies that have real-world relevance? Why might some studies prove to have strong
external validity, whereas other ﬁndings end up largely conﬁned to artiﬁcial laboratory
settings? On this point, the existing literature offers little guidance. One possibility is that
the college student samples frequently used in laboratory research may not generalize to
the population at large, an issue that has received extensive treatment elsewhere (Henrich,
Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010; Henry, 2008, Sears, 1986). Other suggestions for improving
external validity have focused on the development of paradigms that “feel real” to the
participants or sample from real-world stimuli (Aronson et al., 1994; Dhami, Hertwig, &
Hoffrage, 2004; Mitchell, 2012). Yet, these perspectives do not satisfactorily address why
some psychological processes are more real than others, other than in a tautological sense
(i.e., the circular notion that a paradigm elicits real psychological processes if the paradigm
comes from the real world). In essence, despite seasonal hand-wringing about external
validity, the literature directly addressing this topic offers no theoretical justiﬁcation for
predicting a priori that a study should or should not be externally valid.
In this article, we propose a novel way to address this question, which is that scholars could
draw from existing psychological theories to predict differences between a laboratory version
of a paradigm and an externally valid, ﬁeld-like analog. In fact, over the past ﬁve years,
several independent lines of research on interpersonal attraction have used exactly this
strategy. These studies have focused speciﬁcally on the distinction between evaluating a
hypothetical person whom one has never met (e.g., imaginary scenarios or lists of traits),
which rarely occurs outside the laboratory, and evaluating a live person (e.g., face-to-face
interaction), which more closely mimics the way that people meet each other in the real
world (Funder, 1995).1 Although many of these studies did not explicitly intend to address
the issue of external validity, we suggest that this new attraction research is among the ﬁrst
to illuminate the concept of external validity in a theoretically generative manner. Ironically,
the picture that emerges reinforces the suggestion that external invalidity is not the true
enemy of good research (Mook, 1983); rather, researchers err by generalizing their results
to a situation that is likely to elicit a countervailing psychological process.
The next section of this article reviews three theoretical perspectives that have demonstrated great promise in helping researchers to understand why a given study will or will not
exhibit external validity. These three perspectives are affective forecasting/empathy gap
theories (Loewenstein, 1996, 2005; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003), construal level theory
(Liberman, Trope, & Stephan, 2007; Trope & Liberman, 2003, 2010), and mindset theory
(Gollwitzer, 1990, 2012; Gollwitzer & Bayer, 1999). These three theories delineate three
different (but related) dimensions of psychological functioning2, and they offer justiﬁcation
for the hypothesis that one end of the dimension may be more likely than the other to
characterize ﬁeld-based, “real-world” research. The subsequent section reviews several independent lines of attraction research – two from the intergroup domain and three investigating
classic attraction principles – that have drawn from one or more of these theoretical perspectives
to document different psychological processes taking place in hypothetical versus live interactions. This work ﬁnds that hypothetical interactions are often characterized by forecasted
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emotions, abstract construals, and deliberative mindsets, whereas live interactions are often
characterized by experienced emotions, concrete construals, and implemental mindsets. The
ﬁnal section of the article stresses that both ends of all three dimensions are psychologically valid
and real; in fact, forecasting, abstract thinking, and deliberation may be uniquely human mental
features that endowed our ancestors with an impressive evolutionary advantage. Nevertheless,
researchers should endeavor to understand and predict how the very nature of a research
paradigm may cause participants’ minds to inhabit a particular space along these dimensions.
Theoretical Perspectives Relevant to the Hypothetical Versus Live Interaction
Distinction
Affective forecasting
The psychological processes involved in generating emotional judgments about the past or
future can differ from the processes that affect actual emotional experiences in the present.
After all, emotions are momentary: People experience their current feelings, but they cannot
directly summon and experience a perfect facsimile of an emotion that they felt in the past or
an emotion that they will feel in a future hypothetical situation (Robinson & Clore, 2002).
Rather, people draw upon their emotional schemas – their beliefs about the kind and intensity of emotion that they will experience under particular circumstances – when completing
emotional reports about the past or the future. A large corpus of work has documented
differences between anticipated future emotions and experienced emotions, otherwise
known as affective forecasting errors (for a review, see Wilson & Gilbert, 2003).
Affective forecasting errors can arise from a variety of sources. People’s construal of an
emotion-inducing event can be ﬂawed such that people make forecasts about an event
that is fundamentally different than the one that they actually experience; for example,
women may overestimate the likelihood that they would reprimand a sexual harasser
because they imagine a situation in which it will be easy to confront him (Woodzicka
& LaFrance, 2001). In addition, people may possess incorrect theories about the
emotions that the actual event will cause (McFarland, Ross, & DeCourville, 1989;
Wilson, Laser, & Stone, 1982), and they exhibit cold-to-hot empathy gaps such that their
forecasts in “cold” emotional states do not account for the “hot” motivational inﬂuences
(e.g., pain, fear, or arousal) that affect their actual emotional experiences and behavior
(Loewenstein, 2005). Finally, people also fail to realize that they possess a psychological
immune system that responds to emotionally distressing events by helping them to
reinterpret information in a way that mitigates their experienced negative emotions
(Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998).
Thus, the emotional self-reports that people generate when forecasting how they will feel
may differ from the emotional reports that later characterize people’s actual experiences. The
idea that emotional self-reports can range from forecasted to experienced – and that these
two kinds of reports are affected by different psychological processes – could prove relevant
to the hypothetical versus live interaction distinction. Speciﬁcally, it is possible that people
largely rely on affective forecasts when they make judgments about how they will react in
hypothetical interactions with imaginary individuals, but they report their experienced
emotions in the moment when reporting on a live, face-to-face interaction partner. For this
reason, it is possible that people’s emotional reactions will differ in response to hypothetical
versus live interactions; later, we review two studies that drew from the affective forecasting
perspective to document support for this hypothesis (Kawakami, Dunn, Karmali, & Dovidio,
2009; Mallett, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008).
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Construal level theory
A second theoretical perspective relevant to the distinction between evaluating a hypothetical
versus a live interaction partner is construal level theory (Liberman et al., 2007; Trope &
Liberman, 2003, 2010). According to this perspective, people can represent objects at either
a high-level or a low-level construal. High-level construals are abstract, structured, and
emphasize the core, essential features of someone or something; when people represent an
object in a high-level construal, they extract the central gist of the object while ignoring
peripheral details. In contrast, low-level construals are concrete, detailed, and emphasize
contextualized, subordinate features; when people represent an object in a low-level construal,
they focus on details and incorporate peripheral features. As an illustration, the same activity
“taking an exam” can be represented at either a high-level (e.g., succeeding academically) or
a low-level (e.g., writing with a pen) construal.
A core element of construal level theory is that people are more likely to use high-level,
abstract construals when they are considering psychologically distant objects, and they are
more likely to use low-level, concrete construals when they are considering psychologically
near objects (Trope & Liberman, 2010). This distance dimension can literally refer to spatial
distance (e.g., near vs. far), but it can also refer to distance in time (e.g., imminent vs. the past
or future) as well as hypotheticality (e.g., real vs. imagined). This latter point is especially
relevant to the present discussion: When people are considering hypothetical situations, they
are likely to make use of high-level, abstract construals, and when they are considering information in the here-and-now, they are likely to make use of low-level, concrete construals.
This concrete versus abstract distinction has implications for the way that people evaluate
others (Ledgerwood, Trope, & Liberman, 2010). When participants are using an abstract
construal, they tend to make judgments that incorporate information from relevant schemas
and ideologies, but when they are using a concrete construal, they rely to a greater extent on
the immediate social context (Ledgerwood, Trope, & Chaiken, 2010). For example, people
are more likely to believe that a person’s traits would direct his/her behavior across situations
(Nussbaum, Trope, & Liberman, 2003) and more likely to infer that a person’s behavior
connotes that he/she possesses a relevant trait (Rim, Uleman, & Trope, 2009) when in an
abstract than a concrete mindset. This research suggests that people might be more likely
to use traits – which are essentially abstract interpersonal schemas – as a basis for evaluating
another person’s likability when using a high-level, abstract construal. Alternatively, people
might use immediately accessible experiential information (e.g., momentary affect, gut-level
evaluations, chemistry, or rapport; Frost, Chance, Norton, & Ariely, 2008) to evaluate
another person when using a low-level, concrete construal. Two sets of studies that examined
these possibilities are reviewed later in this article (Eastwick, Finkel, & Eagly, 2011;
Park, Young, & Eastwick, 2013).
Mindset theory
Mindset theory (Gollwitzer, 1990, 2012; Gollwitzer & Bayer, 1999) is a third theoretical
perspective that addresses the distinction between evaluating a hypothetical interaction
partner and a live interaction partner. This theory proposes that different psychological
mechanisms are relevant to the process of evaluating possible goals versus executing and
implementing a particular selected goal. When people are evaluating several different goals
and deciding which goal to pursue (i.e., the predecisional phase), they are in a deliberative
mindset. People in a deliberative mindset attempt to accurately assess (a) the pros and cons
of competing goals and (b) whether or not they are likely to achieve each goal successfully.
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Alternatively, when people are pursuing a chosen goal (i.e., the postdecisional phase), they are
in an implemental mindset. People in an implemental mindset focus on information that is useful
in formulating plans that will lead to the successful completion of the selected goal, and they
avoid information about whether the goal is desirable or attainable. In fact, participants often
exhibit excessive optimism about the likelihood of achieving a goal, and this optimism
frequently motivates continued goal pursuit in the face of setbacks (Taylor & Brown, 1988).
Mindsets have inertia; that is, when people are in a particular mindset, they carry that same
processing style into subsequent yet unrelated tasks (Gollwitzer, 2012). Several studies in the
romantic domain drew from this logic to illuminate the positive biases that people hold about
their relationships (Gagné & Lydon, 2001, 2004; Gagné, Lydon, & Bartz, 2003). On average,
people who are involved in a romantic relationship are likely to overestimate how long that
relationship will ultimately last (MacDonald & Ross, 1999). This positive bias could reﬂect
the fact that people typically approach their romantic relationships with an implemental
mindset. Indeed, participants who were experimentally assigned to experience a deliberative
mindset subsequently evaluated their relationships with an uncommon measure of objectivity (Gagné & Lydon, 2001; Gagné et al., 2003). Speciﬁcally, relative to participants in control
or implemental conditions, participants in a deliberative mindset were (a) more likely to forecast accurately whether their relationships would break up over a 6-month period (Gagné &
Lydon, 2001) and (b) more likely to generate commitment reports that accurately predicted
later break-up status (Gagné et al., 2003). These ﬁndings suggest that the average person
treats relationship maintenance as a goal that is currently under pursuit, but when in a
deliberative mindset, people will weigh the pros and cons of their relationship.
But do implemental and deliberative mindsets also affect initial interactions? Just as people
tend to approach their relationships with an implemental mindset – doggedly pursuing their
chosen goal of maintaining positive feelings about their partners (Murray, Holmes, & Grifﬁn,
1996) – perhaps people approach initial encounters (on average) with the goal of maintaining
a smooth and pleasant interaction. However, hypothetical contexts may inspire a deliberative
mindset that causes participants to weigh another individual’s positive and negative traits.
Below, we review a line of research that tested these hypotheses (Maniaci, Reis, Caprariello,
Eastwick, & Finkel, 2012; Reis, Maniaci, Caprariello, Eastwick, & Finkel, 2011).
Recent Attraction Research Examining the Hypothetical Versus Live Interaction
Distinction
Intergroup interactions
Humans are equipped with psychological barriers to intergroup contact, and these barriers
often take the form of affective forecasting errors. For example, people may harbor inaccurately negative expectations about intergroup interactions because they tend to focus on
dissimilarities with out-group members when considering such interactions in the abstract.
However, Mallett et al. (2008) predicted that in an actual intergroup interaction, individuals
would encounter similarities and therefore have a much more positive interaction than anticipated. Across four studies, the researchers assessed individuals’ forecasted (i.e., hypothetical)
and experienced (i.e., live) affective responses to intergroup interactions using daily diary
records and interactions between participants and confederates. As predicted, participants
forecasted that their experiences in intergroup interactions would be more negative than
what they experienced when the interactions actually took place; in fact, participants tended
to rate their actual intergroup experience just as positively as an average intragroup
interaction. Furthermore, this affective forecasting error seemed to emerge because people
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mistakenly focused on dissimilarities when considering hypothetical intergroup interactions:
A manipulation that encouraged participants to focus on similarities when generating their
forecasts successfully reduced the magnitude of the intergroup forecasting error. In other
words, focusing on similarities rather than dissimilarities causes individuals’ affective forecasts
about intergroup interactions to become more positive and accurate. Taken together, the
Mallett et al. (2008) ﬁndings demonstrate how excessively negative affective theories can
cause judgments about hypothetical interactions to differ from actual affective experiences.
Other research has documented similarly faulty affective theories with respect to social
deterrents to racism (Kawakami et al., 2009). In the abstract, majority group members are
aware of the negative stigma associated with being a racist, yet some of them continue to
exhibit racist behaviors. These researchers hypothesized that the tendency to punish ingroup
members for failing to live up to abstract egalitarian norms is weaker than people anticipate,
and so they conducted studies investigating individuals’ affective reactions to a fellow ingroup
member’s racist acts. Drawing from affective forecasting perspectives as well as mindset
theory, the researchers predicted that participants would consult their egalitarian beliefs when
offered the opportunity to provide deliberative responses about encountering a hypothetical
racist, but their nonconscious negative feelings about out-group members would drive their
responses when confronted with a real-life racist. In two studies, White participants either
(a) imagined interacting with or (b) actually interacted with a White confederate who either
did or did not make a racist comment about a Black confederate. Whereas participants
predicted that they would experience considerable distress in a hypothetical situation where
the White individual made a racist comment, participants in the real-life interaction
condition reported feeling little distress regardless of whether or not the White confederate
made the racist comment. Moreover, participants in the hypothetical condition believed that
they would be repulsed by the racist confederate and punish him by choosing the Black
confederate as a task partner, but participants in the live interaction condition tended to
choose the racist White confederate as a partner. This work suggests that, despite people’s
abstract endorsement of egalitarian ideals, people fail to punish racist individuals because their
predictions about their own negative emotional experiences are far more intense than what
they experience when the situation actually occurs.
Initial attraction principles
Other recent research has found that people use different information to evaluate partners
depending on whether they are imagining a hypothetical individual or evaluating live
individuals after a face-to-face interaction. One such line of research examined the conditions under which people would romantically desire potential partners who match rather
than mismatch their stated ideal partner preferences (Eastwick, Finkel, et al., 2011). Ideal
partner preferences for traits are abstract constructs (Eastwick, Luchies, Finkel, & Hunt,
in press), and according to construal level theory, participants’ ideal partner preferences should
predict their relational evaluations (e.g., romantic desire) to the extent that the evaluative context is abstract. However, in the concrete context of a live interaction, participants’ romantic
evaluations may not be associated with the extent to which the potential romantic partner
matches their ideal partner preferences. In two studies, participants evaluated opposite-sex
targets in an abstract context (i.e., a proﬁle that listed the target’s traits) and in a concrete
context (i.e., a live, face-to-face interaction). As predicted, when participants evaluated
potential romantic partners in the abstract, participants desired the partners who matched rather
than mismatched their ideals. In contrast, when participants evaluated potential romantic
partners in a concrete, live initial interaction, the match between the partner’s traits
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and the participants’ ideal partner preferences no longer predicted romantic desire. In fact,
evidence suggested that participants redeﬁned the meaning of the potential partner’s traits
after the live interaction; for example, a participant who liked the live partner might have
reinterpreted the partner’s trait “outspoken” to mean “frank”, whereas a participant
who disliked the partner reinterpreted it to mean “tactless”. That is, participants used the
low-level cues present in the live interaction (e.g., their own gut-level evaluations of the
partner) to contextualize and reinterpret their prior knowledge about the partner’s abstract
qualities. In short, people seem to use low-level experiential information (e.g., momentary
affect; see also Eastwick, Eagly, Finkel, & Johnson, 2011) when evaluating romantic partners
in a live, face-to-face setting, but they use high-level information when evaluating hypothetical
romantic partners in settings lacking behavioral cues.
Another line of work found evidence for a similar disconnect between (a) participants’
desire for certain qualities in a partner in the abstract and (b) participants’ feelings in the
moment about an actual partner who exhibits those qualities (Park et al., 2013). This series
of studies examined men’s reactions to intelligent women: Speciﬁcally, under what
conditions are men attracted to women who outperform (vs. underperform) them on intelligence tests? Again, drawing from construal level theory, the authors hypothesized that in a
psychologically distant, hypothetical scenario, men would consider their abstract beliefs that
intelligent women are desirable. In contrast, in the psychologically close, low-level context
of a live interaction, they hypothesized that the men’s impressions would be dominated by
the negative affective reaction that occurs as a result of being outperformed (Pleban & Tesser,
1981; Tesser, 1988). As predicted, when evaluating female targets in a hypothetical scenario
or in another room (i.e., psychologically distant contexts), male participants reported greater
romantic interest in women who outperformed them than underperformed them on an
intelligence test. However, when evaluating female targets in live, face-to-face interactions
(i.e., psychologically close contexts), male participants reported less romantic interest in
women who outperformed than underperformed them. As with the studies cited above,
these results suggest that as psychological distance decreases, individuals rely on proximal,
situational cues (e.g., feelings of inferiority at being outperformed) in lieu of a partner’s
abstract, desirable characteristics.
A ﬁnal relevant program of research examined the conditions under which familiarity leads
to more or less liking for new acquaintances (Reis et al., 2011). Although classic studies have
suggested that increased familiarity with another person leads to more liking for him/her
(Festinger, Schachter, & Back, 1950; Moreland & Beach, 1992), other evidence has
suggested the opposite effect: that familiarity breeds contempt. Consistent with the latter
possibility, a recent set of studies by Norton and colleagues found that as the number of traits
used to describe a hypothetical person increased, participants’ liking for that person decreased
(Norton, Frost, & Ariely, 2007). In an attempt to reconcile the Norton studies with the
classic familiarity research, Reis et al. (2011) drew from mindset theory to suggest that
participants might approach such a hypothetical target very differently than they approach
live face-to-face interactions. Speciﬁcally, they suggested that evaluating lists of traits (as in
Norton et al., 2007) activates a deliberative mindset and encourages participants to weigh
the advantages and disadvantages of each trait, whereas live interactions activate an
implemental mindset that motivates participants to work toward the goal of having a smooth,
pleasurable interaction. In fact, Reis et.al. (2011) found support for the idea that, in a live
interaction paradigm, familiarity leads participants to report more liking for new acquaintances
just as in the classic familiarity studies. A follow-up live interaction study (Maniaci et al., 2012)
replicated this positive effect of familiarity on liking among participants primed with an
implemental mindset; however, participants primed with a deliberative mindset tended to show
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the negative effect of familiarity on liking found in the Norton et al. (2007) studies. This
work suggests that people may approach lists of traits by weighing the pros and cons of those
traits, whereas they approach live interactions with the intent to implement a smooth and
pleasant interaction.
Discussion
Implications
The preceding review suggests that live interactions differ from hypothetical ones in several
ways. In live interactions, people tend to report their actual emotional experiences; incorporate concrete, contextual details into their responses; and attempt to implement the goal of
making the interaction proceed smoothly. In hypothetical scenarios, people tend to use
schemas to forecast their emotions, consider abstract information such as ideals and
ideologies, and deliberate about other people’s positive and negative features. Three wellestablished theoretical perspectives – affective forecasting, construal level theory, and mindset
theory – clearly predict the emergence of these psychological process differences between
live and hypothetical paradigms (see Table 1).
Upon initial inspection, the live interaction paradigm would seem to have better external
validity than the hypothetical scenario paradigm (Funder, 1995). People nearly always meet
potential romantic partners face-to-face before they decide to form a romantic relationship
(Finkel, Eastwick, Karney, Reis, & Sprecher, 2012)3; moreover, the complexities of real-life
intergroup relations are inherently dyadic and were imperfectly assessed by past intrapersonal
approaches (Shelton, 2000). In fact, several of the studies reviewed above used a live interaction paradigm because the researchers explicitly questioned whether people “in real-world
social interaction” actually exhibit the same evaluations that had previously been demonstrated in hypothetical contexts (Eastwick, Finkel, et al., 2011; Reis et al., 2011). Thus,
one lesson that emerges from these recent studies of attraction is that a prototypical externally
valid study is likely to involve participants who are experiencing emotions, using concrete
construals, or implementing goals. This work addresses the appeal of Mook (1983) to look
past a study’s cosmetic similarity to real life and focus instead on the generalizability of the
relevant psychological processes to real life (i.e., psychological realism; Aronson et al.,
1994; Brewer, 2000). In fact, experienced emotions, concrete construals, and implemental
mindsets could comprise a substantial component of what psychological realism means, at
least within the attraction realm.
However, there is a deeper conclusion lurking in these literatures, a conclusion that
cautions against the knee-jerk dismissal of any mental process as psychologically unreal and
externally invalid. The present work suggests that the hypothetical versus live interaction
distinction covaries with certain psychological features; yet, even if people are more likely
Table 1. Theoretical distinctions between live and hypothetical interactions.
Theoretical dimension
Affective forecasting
Construal-level theory
Mindset theory
© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Live interactions
(ﬁeld-based)
Hypothetical scenarios
(laboratory-based)
Experienced
Concrete (low-level)
Implemental
Forecasted
Abstract (high-level)
Deliberative
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to use a low-level construal, experience emotions, and implement goals in live interactions
than when considering hypothetical scenarios, it does not follow that abstraction, forecasting,
and deliberation are invalid mental processes. After all, voting is an activity in which people
transcend the here-and-now and consult their abstract beliefs and ideologies (Ledgerwood,
Trope, & Liberman, 2010). Even though people only perform this behavior yearly (if that),
it has profound real-world implications and psychologists must endeavor to understand it.
In fact, forecasting and abstract thinking probably differentiate humans from the rest of the
animal kingdom: These skills are likely to be new evolutionary innovations, emerging in
the human lineage as recently as 50,000 years ago (Eastwick, 2009; Mithen, 1996). These
newly evolved mental abilities provided humans with a degree of ﬂexibility and foresight
unprecedented in the animal kingdom, and these skills were likely critical in enabling
humans to become the most successful hominids on the planet. Forecasting, abstraction,
and deliberation are very real, and however frequently they emerge in daily life, their
importance cannot be overstated.
Thus, whether we conceptualize external validity as cosmetic similarity to real life or as
psychological realism, there is nothing inherently problematic about conducting an “externally
invalid” study. A dilemma arises only when researchers study a set of mental processes in one
setting and attempt to generalize those ﬁndings to a setting that elicits the countervailing set
of processes. For example, abstract concepts should correlate with related abstract concepts:
The abstract qualities that people rate highly in an ideal romantic partner are associated with
abstract beliefs about the qualities of the self (Campbell, Simpson, Kashy, & Fletcher, 2001)
and abstract anticipated future roles (Eagly, Eastwick, & Johannesen-Schmidt, 2009). However,
abstract concepts may not translate to concrete contexts: As reviewed above, ideal partner
preferences do not affect the way that people evaluate live opposite-sex individuals as they
consider forming an actual romantic relationship (see also Eastwick & Finkel, 2008; Eastwick
et al., in press). Ideal partner preferences are externally valid constructs, but they are abstract,
and romantic relationship initiation is a low-level, affectively laden process (Eastwick, Eagly,
et al., 2011; Simpson, Campbell, & Berscheid, 1986).
According to this line of reasoning, even the classic enemy of external validity – the
demand characteristic – takes on a less insidious character. When demand characteristics
are present, people might exhibit a particular evaluation or behavior simply because an
experimenter wanted or expected it. Although this situation seems to exemplify psychological unreality, people do indeed perform such socially normative behavior: they stop at red
lights, pay for their groceries, and remove their hats for the national anthem (Greenwood,
2004). The dilemma with demand characteristics is only that the researcher typically intends
for the ﬁndings to address a phenomenon that is not simply obedience or expectancy
conﬁrmation. The core task for scholars is to properly deﬁne the types of situations and
settings to which a set of psychological processes generalize, and the theories identiﬁed above
can aid researchers in precisely this task.
Future directions
The studies reviewed in this manuscript suggest that – speciﬁcally within the domain of initial
attraction – the hypothetical versus live distinction covaries with forecasted versus experienced
emotions, high-level versus low-level construals, and deliberative versus implemental mindsets.
What does this observation imply with respect to studies that have used hypothetical paradigms
to test hypotheses in domains unrelated to attraction? Sometimes, scholars’ choice of paradigm
is likely to make a difference: Although people tend to attribute positive events to their own
efforts and negative events to other causes, one meta-analysis revealed that this self-serving bias
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is stronger when the events are hypothetical than when they are real (Mezulis, Abramson,
Hyde, & Hankin, 2004). The mechanism underlying this difference could indeed be related
to the three psychological processes described above, although these mechanisms have not
yet been explored to our knowledge.
Yet in other cases, hypothetical paradigms may produce results that are identical to real-life
ones: Women are more likely to exhibit forgiveness than men, and this meta-analytic sex
difference is just as strong for hypothetical as it is for actual transgressions (Miller,
Worthington, & McDaniel, 2008). Such a ﬁnding could indicate that the mental operations
that characterize forgiveness typically occupy one end of the affective forecasting, construal
level, and mindset dimensions. That is, forgiveness may require that people deliberate about
future goals and other broader considerations (Finkel, Rusbult, Kumashiro, & Hannon,
2002; Yovetich & Rusbult, 1994), and therefore people gravitate toward abstraction and
deliberation in order to forgive even when the transgression is real. Similarly, if we move
beyond the hypothetical versus real stimuli distinction and consider the broader laboratory
versus ﬁeld distinction, many research topics exhibit convergence across paradigms. For
example, violence research has demonstrated that individual differences and situational factors
tend to predict violence equally strongly in the real world versus the laboratory (Anderson &
Bushman, 1997), perhaps because the laboratory studies did an excellent job of reproducing
the emotionally evocative, anger-inducing situations common in ﬁeld studies (i.e., participants
were experiencing, not forecasting, in these laboratory studies). In short, the current review
generates the hypothesis that when research paradigms differ along one or more of the three
dimensions identiﬁed in Table 1, they will produce different results, and when paradigms
occupy the same approximate location on these dimensions, they will produce similar results.
Finally, we should note that other dimensions beyond the three identiﬁed here will likely
prove relevant to the hypothetical versus live distinction. For example, people may preferentially use social categories (e.g., stereotypes) to evaluate hypothetical others, whereas they
may use piecemeal processing to evaluate others in a face-to-face setting (Fiske, Lin, &
Neuberg, 1999; Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). Most of the studies in this tradition happened to
use hypothetical paradigms and demonstrated that participants defaulted to categorical over
piecemeal processing (e.g., Fiske, Neuberg, Beattie, & Milberg, 1987), but perhaps the
dominance of categorical processing would weaken or even reverse in the context of a live
interaction. In fact, this hypothesis is consistent with the classic LaPiere (1934) study in which
restaurant and hotel managers exhibited racist attitudes when asked whether they would
serve a hypothetical Asian couple, yet they typically served without prejudice an actual Asian
couple who visited their establishments. Similarly, people respond differently to general
versus speciﬁc cases (Sherman, Beike, & Ryalls, 1999), and it is possible that a live interaction
emphasizes the qualities of a speciﬁc target, whereas a hypothetical other highlights the
qualities shared by a general category of targets. Finally, decision making research has
documented that hypothetical versus actual decisions can differ for a variety of reasons, some
of which may be distinct from the theories reviewed here (e.g., comprehension of the task;
Kühberger, Schulte-Mecklenbeck, & Perner, 2002). No studies have drawn from these
frameworks to examine differences between hypothetical and live initial interactions, but
they are promising guides for additional research.
Conclusion
Allport (1968) deﬁned social psychology as the study of “how the thought, feeling, and
behavior of individuals are inﬂuenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others”
(p. 3). Today, the study of actual others and the study of imagined/implied others still belong
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285
under the same epistemological roof, but that does not mean that these different others are
psychologically equivalent, interchangeable parts. Some psychological processes may not
generalize between evaluations of live versus hypothetical others, and the possibility that
people exhibit processing differences across laboratory and real-world contexts has always
been the critical question underlying vague concerns about our ﬁeld’s external validity
(Mook, 1983). Recent research on attraction has advanced this discussion by positioning such
differences within strong theoretical frameworks such as affective forecasting, construal level
theory, and mindset theory. The dimensions that underlie these theories are “valid” in the
sense that they characterize real psychological phenomena, but participants may be more
likely to occupy a particular portion of these dimensions depending on whether they are
currently in the laboratory or going about their daily lives. This is a new, more precise
way of thinking about the age-old question of external validity – a perspective that may help
mitigate the midnight angst of future scholars who seek peace between the rival factions of
ﬁeld and laboratory researchers.
Acknowledgment
We thank Eli Finkel for his feedback on a previous version of this manuscript. This research was
facilitated by National Science Foundation Grant # 1147828 awarded to Paul W. Eastwick.
Short Biographies
Paul Eastwick is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of
Human Development and Family Sciences. His research examines initial attraction, relationship
maintenance, and the evolutionary psychology of human mating. He recently was awarded a
National Science Foundation grant to study how attachment bonds between mating partners
intersect with hormonal inﬂuences on mating behavior. His research on the role of ideal partner
preferences in predicting people’s desire to initiate and maintain romantic relationships received
the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP) Dissertation Award.
Lucy Hunt is a graduate student in the Department of Human Development and Family
Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research investigates the extent to which
perceivers achieve consensus about the desirable qualities of potential romantic partners. She
is also interested in applying these insights to the online dating domain.
Lisa Neff is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin in the Department of
Human Development and Family Sciences. Her expertise and theoretical interests lie in the
study of relationship quality and development during the early years of marriage. She is
currently funded by a National Science Foundation grant examining how and when stressors
external to the relationship (e.g., work stress, ﬁnancial difﬁculties) hinder couples’ efforts to
engage in relationship-promoting behaviors. She received the Caryl E. Rusbult Early Career
Award from the Relationship Researchers Interest Group within the Society for Personality
and Social Psychology in 2012.
Endnotes
* Correspondence address: Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
78712, USA. Email: [email protected]
1
The studies reviewed in this article speciﬁcally examined the hypothetical versus live interaction distinction, which has
historically been considered a subtype of the broader laboratory versus ﬁeld distinction. In fact, both Anderson et al.
(1999) and Mitchell (2012) conceptualized meta-analyses comparing hypothetical versus real stimuli as examples of
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the laboratory versus ﬁeld comparison. Of course, this analogy is far from perfect; people sometimes encounter
descriptions of hypothetical others outside of the laboratory (e.g., online dating proﬁles). Furthermore, as the
studies reviewed below demonstrate, laboratory designs can reproduce the live face-to-face interactions that permeate
the real world.
2
Strictly speaking, implemental and deliberative mindsets are conceptually independent goal pursuit strategies.
However, the two mindsets typically do not coexist at a given moment in time but rather function in a sequence like
a stage model (Gollwitzer, 2012; Gollwitzer & Bayer, 1999). Thus, for the purposes of the current discussion,
implemental and deliberative mindsets can be conceptualized as occupying opposite ends of a “mindset” dimension.
3
For the purposes of the current discussion, the critical distinction is whether the participants’ experience with the
target is an abstract description or a concrete live experience. Although an online dating partner may literally be real,
from the perspective of the participant, he/she exists as a hypothetical “proﬁle” until some form of interpersonal
interaction takes place.
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